Takeaway
Medical training exposes us to death, often without providing space to process these encounters. Creating opportunities for reflection could transform overwhelming experiences into sources of compassion and growth.
Passion in the medical profession | July 20, 2026 | 2 min read
By Jacob Balin, MD, Cambridge Health Alliance, Harvard Medical School
I was holding her ribcage. Just her ribcage, skin flayed off, muscles exposed, reedy threads of ligament and cartilage. The whine of the bone saw still rang in my ears.
Before we started, we had a service. 20 minutes or so was all we gave to the soul—the body awaited us impatiently. I approached that gleaming metal table with grooves and rivulets for embalming juice to flow. Laying on top was an opaque black bag with a zipper down the center. I stepped up, pulled the zipper, and there she was.
We were told that once we’d sliced through the ribs, the membrane connecting them to the lungs would come off easily. Instead, I pulled, and it didn’t give. So I pulled harder, and a bit harder still, and with a squelching sound, the ribs gave way, taking with them a sickening mass of misformed lung—cancer had fused lung, rib, and membrane into a jagged lumpy mass of flesh.
And then her ribs were off. Just the ribs and me. The ribs. Where had the person gone? I never knew her name. They never told us. She’d lost so much by the time I started on her. Or it? The ribs. I held them at arm’s length, and suddenly we reversed—the ribs were looking at me. I was them. That was what I would become. And the ribs opened to the void.
To be honest, I’m not sure this experience made me a better physician.In that moment, I felt a churning, queasy thing, like looking into a bottomless pit—my own limitations as a doctor as well as the inevitability of my eventual illness and death. But I was in an anatomy lab with professors whose attention was on dissection technique—atria, ventricles, neurovascular bundles. There was no invitation or openness to the encounter with death, so I said nothing. The event sits in my memory as a jumbled mass, the way that all overwhelming events do when we hold them by ourselves.
I suspect that, under different conditions, this experience might have made me a better doctor. What if a chaplain had been there? What if contemplating our own relationship to death had been part of the anatomy course itself?
We teach medical students to dissect the body with precision, but we rarely teach them how to hold the weight of what that body represents—or how weight might shape the physicians they become.
This piece expresses the views solely of the author. It does not necessarily represent the views of any organization, including Johns Hopkins Medicine.